TIME SENSITIVE – Please read ASAP

Dear Northshore Corridor Neighbors,

Have you noticed the recent rapid build-up of traffic around your West Knoxville neighborhood, overcrowding in your child’s school, flooding in or around your neighborhood, or retail business being built immediately next door to a nearby neighborhood?

This is not happening accidentally. The very limited remaining Knox County land is being quickly rezoned for development and without adequate advanced planning.

Every month our Knox County Planning and County Commissioners approve more ill-conceived rezonings that permit reckless, overly dense development just as if ordinances and zoning do not exist. This is quickly destroying the viability and beauty of our desirable community. In permitting these ill-conceived rezonings commissioners are not only ignoring the need for advance planning but are also failing to enforce existing zoning. Our commissioners repeatedly override the legal zoning plans and ordinances already on our books that are designed to prevent exactly what is now being permitted. With very limited, highly controlled citizen input, our zoning and ordinances are being gutted parcel-by-parcels as neighborhoods that object to what is happening to them are repeatedly sent away in disappointment as developers and their lawyers’ prevail.

Right now, as you read this, previously protected steep slopes and ridgetops are being bulldozed. A drive down Pellissippi Parkway toward Oak Ridge provides a quick view of this bad problem. Hundreds of apartments already now sit on formerly protected ridge tops – permanently ruining beautiful, ancient mountain views, pouring runoff into our overburdened waterways and directing traffic onto already dangerous roadways.

Sadly, much of the profit produced by the overdevelopment goes to out of state corporations that have strategically partnered with local developers. We must ask – where will those partners be when the Knox County taxpayers must pay for the impacts of this profiteering?

Is it an accident that the December Knox County planning zoning agenda is jam-packed – with aggressive ill-conceived development plans?

While citizens are too busy to notice and act, development promoters and local law firms specialized in overcoming local zoning and ordinances are over-riding the legal plans on our books, to ram through their profit-seeking plans.

Thursday at 1:30 in the City County Building Commissioners will be considering several large, complex rezoning plans that affect several areas, including Hardin Valley which faces a proposal from Safe Harbor, the developer NCA successfully sued. Please make plans to attend Thursday if possible, to watch on CCTV and/or contact your commissioner to ask for a slow down in approvals that are outrunning planning.

We will follow this post with additional information, facts and how- to. Please watch for it.